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Canwest News Service
"My daddy's people worried about me a great deal growing up. My granddaddy, he was a Pentecostal preacher, and they said I was going to hell in a handbasket, but I didn't think I was doing anything evil – I was doing something good for me, not bad for them," says Dolly Parton, on the phone from Dollyland, her amusement park not far from where she was born in East Tennessee. "People still tell me I wear too much makeup in the daytime. I say, You mind your own business, I'll wear my makeup when I want to, how I want to.' I don't want to conform to anything – what matters is that I write and sing from my heart."
Parton, who released her latest album, Dolly: Live From London, this week, first started singing in church. By the time she was 13, she had performed at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry for Johnny Cash, and she says that from the very beginning she marched to her own beat.
"Nobody could make me do any different than what I wanted – that's why I have such a gay following," Parton, 63, says. "They love the fact that I am who I am. I was always willing to fight for it, and I did."
Parton has been fighting since she released her first record, Hello, I'm Dolly, in 1967. And in a career that has earned her record sales of more than 100 million, her latest live album features her trademark banter with fans along with the music.
"My daddy's people are funny, my momma's people are funny – no matter how awful things were, we found the humour in the situation," says Parton, who titled her last record Backwoods Barbie, which she describes as someone like herself who can go to the store for a quart of milk and come back with a gallon of hair spray. Parton says her jokes, like her hair and her outfits, are part of the show.
"I don't know if people really took me that serious as a writer-musician- singer – they couldn't get past the hair and makeup and boobs. That's my own fault, but I don't care," Parton says. "The audience gets a kick out of it and, since they're paying good money, the least I can do is give them every bit of me that I can."
An astute businesswoman once ranked country music's wealthiest star, Parton also acts as a mentor to the likes of Carrie Underwood, Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift. When Kanye West interrupted Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Music Awards, Parton was outraged.
"I wanted to kick his ass in between his shoulder blades," she says. "I bet he just about felt awful about what he'd done – when he sobered up."
Parton has seen her song 9 to 5 turned into a Broadway musical and Whitney Houston's version of I Will Always Love You become one of music's biggest selling singles of all time. The sweetest part of her accolades, she says, is becoming successful without having to change.
"One of my favourite memories involves Chet Atkins. I was recording with RCA and he said, My golly, you need to change your look, get rid of that hair, the gaudy clothing and that cheap makeup!' " Parton recalls. "Then all those years later I became a big star and Chet came up to me and said, See, didn't I tell you?' People still tell me, I didn't know you wrote songs.' Well, I'm full of surprises. That's part of the fun."
Dolly: Live From London is available on Dolly Records.
